Rebrand

This is the same newsletter except for the ways in which it is now different.

The sky above my backyard in St. Louis, where I have spent a lot of time just looking straight up.

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed in the past week. There are more than a hundred of you, which is awesome, due in large part to my good friend Mark Zuckerman, who just launched his newsletter on the Nationals — Nats Journal — and then sent a lot of people my way. And so I figured, with new readers pouring in this morning, one after another, it’s as good a time as any for an update.

Once upon a time, as most of you know, this was a newsletter that focused on off-field topics in college sports, a companion to my coverage at the Washington Post (which once upon a time had a sports section). But then the Post laid me off last week, two days shy of my ninth anniversary with the paper. And once I finished mourning the loss of my dream job, I thought I should rebrand this space, if only to take a tiny step into the rest of my writing life.

Okay, I’m still mourning the loss of my dream job. But that’s a whole other conversation.

The new name, By Jesse Dougherty, should be pretty intuitive. As ever, I plan to use the newsletter to distribute my work, wherever it may appear, and deliver my thoughts and feelings to your inbox, whenever the mood strikes.

If you subscribed because you’re a total junkie for failed attempts to pass a Congressional bill on college sports, I would understand if you saw yourself out, even if I would be sad to see you go. But, also, wait. Just a second. This will remain free. One more time: This will remain free. And who knows, maybe, at some point, I’ll write again about college sports on Capitol Hill, which always brought a lot of people here. That all still interests me, too.

The other day, an old friend said to me: “You can write about anything you want now.” I’m not sure how long that will last. I’m already applying to full-time jobs, seeing that we’re expecting a baby girl this month and healthcare is a good thing to have. But for the time being, consider this an open-ended venture, going with the wind. I hope you’ll stick around and tell your friends about it. It would mean a lot.

And in the meantime, please support my friends and former co-workers who are setting out on their own. Mark is filling a massive coverage vacuum on the Nationals beat, my old stomping grounds. Neil Greenberg, who was the Post’s self-described sports stats geek until last week, is launching a newsletter (Fancy Stats) this spring. Ron Charles, the Post’s now-former book critic — and an all-time nice person — is already writing on Substack, which is why my wife was cracking up at the dining room table the other day. Tatum Hunter, who covers the heck out of internet culture, an extremely important topic area these days, is launching soon, too.

Jack Shafer, Politico’s longtime media reporter, is keeping a list of former Washington Post writers who have started newsletters. It’s almost as if these people would make up quite the newsroom. But I digress.